Geophysicist Victor Sardina said the Hawaii-based center was urging all countries included in the warning to take the threat very seriously.

“Everybody is under a warning because the wave, we know, is on its way. Everybody is at risk now,” he said in a telephone interview.

The warning follows a huge earthquake in Chile that killed at least 82 people and triggered tsunamis up and down the coast of the earthquake-prone country.

The center estimates the first tsunami, which is a series of several waves in succession, will hit Hawaii at 11:19 a.m. Hawaii time (4:19 p.m. EST) in the town of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii, with waves in Honolulu at 11:52 a.m.

Sardina said the Hawaiian islands could expect waves of six feet (two meters) in some places. Other estimates have been higher but he could not confirm those were likely.

I’m not sure whether there’s anything coherent or decent to say about the wreckage in Port-au-Prince. I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office today, translating a form for an injured patient when footage of the quake aired. I’d read a news headline—7.5, it said—and moved on to the finer points of the Leno-O’Brien catfight without giving the event a second thought. As a longtime resident of the Ring of Fire (on both hemispheres) one thing I’ve learned about earthquakes is that the Richter rating is the least sensational thing about them. If all you hear is a number, chances are a more terrible metric hasn’t yet emerged.

The Haiti footage came on HLN, that catastrophe of a channel that specializes in kidnapped children. This particular doctor’s office has HLN blaring all the time so that the lobby is ablaze with the outrage of Common Sense. It’s hard to blow your nose without feeling like you’ve taken a stand (this is how they talk) on sex offenders. I had Dante’s Inferno with me and struggled in vain to read this bit of Canto IV: “the heavy sleep within my head was smashed by an enormous thunderclap, so that I started up as one whom force awakens.”

The host was a tragic (smart) woman whose job it is to engagingly present people’s Facebook comments on legalizing medical marijuana and whether a mother should or should not have murdered her child. She asks people to please call her or contact her on Facebook to “get your voice heard.” But she is no actress. She is a journalist, despite her good looks and excellent makeup, and her eyes turned almost human when news turned to Haiti and she announced that “hundreds of thousands” were suspected dead.

I put “hundreds of thousands” in quotes because that’s how it appeared onscreen for the rest of the day. A different number was spoken and a new metric has emerged.

I’ve been reading Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award, which flirts with a tidal wave (a fictional temptation echoed in Margaret Atwood’s short story “Happy Endings” where the fictional author, getting more and more desperate to generate a worthwhile plot, defaults, in version D, to a tsunami). What’s important in Willett’s novel is that neither plotwise nor in fact does the much-feared natural disaster really come.

The next few lines of the Inferno talk about “the melancholy valley containing thundering, unending wailings” in which “though I gazed into its pit, I was unable to discern a thing.” Being the kind of cold-hearted prig who talks about storytelling when real tragedy hits, I guess I was pleased to gaze into the pit as long as it remained undiscernable. Discernment is vitaminic and cauterizing. Before this 7.5 earthquake happened, I was curious about how this kind of story would be told.

But now?

The temptation, and it’s a real one, is simple and ostrich-like. The temptation is to let this particular set of awful stories go. Better just to help. Isn’t it enough to send money to Oxfam, to the American Red Cross, without having to know anything more? Can’t I be an HLN Facebook commenter? Of what use can it possibly be to find out more about this particular data set?

A tangent, because it’s hard to look some things in the face: fourteenth-century Florence enforced a humanist education as a means of preparing its citizens for what sounds, today, like a freakishly participative government. It was governed by a council of nine men, the signoria, the head of which served exactly two months in office before another one was elected. (The thought of a presidential election every two months just made me pick at my bottom lip so much it bled.)

The “elections” were lotteries. Theoretically the name of every man over thirty who belonged to a Guild and was free of debt was included. (In practice it was an easy system to game, and the Medicis did, but the model still fascinates me. ) Therefore, it was urgent and important to have an educated public that could rise, if randomly selected, to the challenge of prospective government.

The case for an educated public seems weaker now. (I’m using “educated” broadly here; I’m talking as much about current events as I am about neo-Platonism or calculus.) I want to be convinced of its value.

It’s been suggested that Bush is Exhibit A in the People’s case against American stupidity. Maybe. It may be that an uneducated public elected an uneducated man. I’d suggest, though, that the real driving force behind it all was money, and money has a talent for continually defying our claims for what an education provides.

Because we’re stupid at economics. Economists are as good at money as meteorologists are at weather. Experienced stockbrokers can’t outperform chance. Education has nothing to do with economics, and our educational system is fundamentally ill-equipped to prepare its citizens to deal with the willful supranational monster money has become. There are no teachers.

That education has value is basically an article of faith. That’s a weak position for an education to be in, and—to take a premise of Hornby’s fantastic movie An Education seriously—it’s worth considering the merits of intellectual agnosticism.

The usual question—the one An Education asks—is what it means to be participate meaningfully in our own time. What I’d rather ask, in the face of natural disaster, is whether the “meaningful” aspect of our participation as outsiders matters.

My ostrich answer—in which we donate and minimize our exposure to distressing information—offers a great solution, the one I’ve already proposed: money.

The American Red Cross could sell the secular equivalent of papal indulgences.

Hear me out. Back in the day, saints, on their arrival in heaven, would donate whatever extra merit they didn’t need to the Catholic Church. It would be stored in the Great Treasure House of Merit, a nebulous bank of Christian virtue in which the pope held the only checkbook and wrote people indulgences when they were short on merit of their own, or short on the time required to do penance. (Luther’s first salvo against the pope: that the donated Merit belonged to all Christianity and that the pope was effectively a squatter.)

We could all buy some Haitian relief and it would all have the real merit of real dollars going to real people. Whether we ourselves go through the spiritual steps that precede penance—whether we experience real contrition, or empathy, or anything—seems less than relevant.

Provided we donate, why find out more about Haiti than HLN provides?

I’m groping here*. I’m hoping for something besides the categorical imperative. Journalism depends on our need for news and relies on an ingrained integrity of soul and public-spiritedness that wants its news told accurately and well. Journalism is also (therefore?) dying.

(Another cause we should throw money at?)

A week ago I was interpreting for an injured worker who was undergoing a psychological evaluation. These appointments are the worst. They take forever, they’re grueling for the patient, and they leave my hand cramping from filling in bubbles on a questionnaire that asks you in nine different ways whether you think you have special powers or loved your dead father. Different doctors use different tests. This particular one was 400 questions long.

Before starting, a psychiatrist interviewed the patient, who was, by the way, a sullen, angry-looking man. When the doctor asked him a routine question (“what medicines are you taking?”), the patient burst into violent sobs. Face-time with the doctor was brief; he did what he could, then escorted us out into the waiting room, where another patient and his interpreter were occupying two of four available chairs.

“We don’t have a private room for you,” the psychiatrist said, “but you can do the questionnaire here.”

I stared at him. He was asking my patient to answer 400 questions about his innermost demons IN PUBLIC. With two strangers as inevitable witnesses. (There was no way they could not hear us, just like there was no way for me not to hear HLN over the Inferno.) I told him we needed a private room. He said he was very sorry, there was nothing to be done.

I did my best to construct a sound booth using the questionnaire and to make it seem like it wasn’t him, me, the other patient and the other interpreter. It’s just the two of us! I intimated, as if that were an improvement. I whispered the questions, trying to make it seem like I wasn’t whispering because for either of us to acknowledge that would mean recognizing our position: an outsider sitting next to a stranger whose life is in ruins, asking him over and over whether he still gets erections, whether he cries often, would he steal if no one was watching, does he want to die.

M

*And I’m less interested in HLN and its many flaws than I am in the whole problem—what, beside Arko Datta’s symbolic photo, we really need.

A friend of the blog remarked, after watching Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, that the ending—in which the US is forced to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City as a “good faith” gesture so as to show the USSR that the bomb that hit Moscow was deployed in error—was devastating in a way that annihilation of the whole world by nuclear war somehow wouldn’t be. It’s an effect made worse, he said, by ten quick scenes that capture New York City street life the second before the bomb hit.

I remembered that remark as I watched a documentary on the 2004 tsunami’s effects on Phuket, and I’ve been thinking ever since about different classes of disaster and how we tell them. The kind of disaster I have in mind isn’t nuclear. It’s large-scale, protracted, rife with survivors, and messy enough that it had to go mostly untelevised and was reconstructed in retrospect. In other words, if I’m not talking about nuclear war*, neither am I thinking about 9/11, an event that included both a bizarre specificity (people reporting from the building across the street) and a bleak absoluteness of result. Like the nuclear ending in Fail-Safe, it was also quick. One of the strangest things about that day was how it shrugged off our definitions of disaster relief: millions of blood donations went unused but ashes hung over the city for weeks. We rushed to offer a liquid solution to a gaseous problem and had no access to the monumental change of phase that was really under way.

I’m interested in a different class of disaster—a disaster with a surfeit of survivors and an absence of agents. Such a disaster, without its US and USSR, produces acute narrative problems. Take the tsunami and its companion-piece, the earthquake. They make for addled storytelling because battle tropes don’t apply and heroism can’t swim. Good and evil sit marooned and watching from Orlando’s lunatic moon, alongside terrorists and bombers and civilians and countries, all waiting patiently for the casting call that will make them relevant or the event legible. They don’t, obviously. In a tsunami, the difference between up and down (or shore and land or vacation bungalow and fisherman’s hut) is academic.

Here’s how Ammianus, in his Res Gestae, described a tsunami and the earthquake preceding it on July 21, A.D. 365:

16. Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun’s rays. 17. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. 18. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. 19. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses, as happened at Alexandria, and others were hurled nearly two miles from the shore, like the Laconian vessel near the town of Methone which I saw when I passed by, yawning apart from long decay.

That last sentence shows astounding restraint. If confronted by a similar

Receding tsunami waters at Kata Noi Beach on 26 December 2004.

ship that had been deposited two miles inland by a tidal wave, I’d have a LOT more to say about it. I’d be inclined to stick a hand up it and make it explain, the way Jerome does in his Life of St. Hilarion, where he directly links the 365 tsunami to the death of Julian, who had died two years earlier:

At that time there was an earthquake over the whole world, following on the death of Julian, which caused the sea to burst its bounds, and left ships hanging on the edge of mountain steeps. It seemed as though God were threatening a second deluge, or all things were returning to original chaos. When the people of Epidaurus saw this, I mean the roaring waves and heaving waters and the swirling billows mountain-high dashing on the shore, fearing that what they saw had happened elsewhere might befall them and their town be utterly destroyed, they made their way to the old man [Hilarion], and as if preparing for a battle placed him on the shore.

After making the sign of the cross three times on the sand, he faced the sea, stretched out his hands, and no one would believe to what a height the swelling sea stood like a wall before him. It roared for a long time as if indignant at the barrier, then little by little sank to its level. Epidaurus and all the region roundabout tell the story to this day, and mothers teach their children to hand down the remembrance of it to posterity.

Sixteen hundred years later, in 1960, Hilarion’s miracle would be repeated in Chile by a group spearheaded by Raul Saez, who saved a hefty chunk of the country from flooding. Granted, the Great Chilean Earthquake wasn’t nuclear war, but it could have been, and for many who lived through the 1960 quake, that was their first thought:

José Argomedo was 22 years old and living on a farm outside Maullín, Chile, where he got news of the world from his radio. Early in May 1960, the big news was the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union-a Soviet missile had downed an American spy plane.

On May 18, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, suggested treating the United States like a cat that had stolen cream. “Wouldn’t it be better,” he said, “to take the American aggressors by the scruff of the neck also and give them a little shaking?”

A few days later, on the afternoon of May 22, while out riding his horse, Mr. Argomedo felt more than a little shaking. As the ground beneath him shook hard for several minutes, he was forced to get off his horse. Mr. Argomedo thought the Cold War had turned hot. However, like everyone else in the area of Maullín, Quenuir, and La Pasada, he was actually living through a magnitude 9.5 earthquake, the largest ever measured.

That earthquake culminated in several landslides that blocked the outflow of Rinihue Lake, the lowest of a chain of lakes that receive a constant inflow from the Enco River. The blocked river (San Pedro) threatened to flood Chile’s oldest city, Valdivia, and every other town along the river in less than five hours. If the dam broke, things would be much, much worse.

To avoid the destruction of the city, several military units and hundreds of workers from ENDESA, CORFO, and MOP started an effort, called the Riñihuazo, to control the lake. Twenty-seven bulldozers were put into service, but they had severe difficulties moving in the mud near the dams, so dykes had to be constructed with shovels. A proposal by some US military to blow up the dams with missiles from an helicopter was rejected.

Then there are the survivors of the 2005 tsunami, which is known variously as the Asian Tsunami or the Boxing Day Tsunami in what seems like a hokey reprise of other politically motivated nameoffs. (No victors here.) The documentary I saw focused on white, British survivors who’d been vacationing in Phuket when the wave hit. It struck me as a self-serving and insensitive lens, but the tsunami complicates the usual case for Oppression Olympics. There are things money can fix: the couple that was scuba-diving when the wave hit had the means to fix her pelvis, which snapped in two under the pressure, and his legs. But the woman whose seven-year-old daughter was torn from her arms when the wave broke through their bungalow lost her. I’ve scoured Youtube in vain for footage of that particular woman because her interview shocked me. Watching her speak you never suspected, not even for a moment, that the daughter would be gone by story’s end. That she was seemed to surprise her as much as it did me. It was astoundingly sad.

I did, however, find this footage of the only survivors’ account of the 1958 “Super Giant Tsunami” in Lituya Bay in Alaska, which ends with the older man’s boat deposited a good way up a mountain. The BBC tries desperately to illustrate with scary shots of turbulent water. The man is with his son, who was eight years old at the time, and remembers the weird things kids remember about events like those. The BBC’s visuals are utterly distracting. Understandable; it’s a documentary and they need some kind of visual, but their efforts to reproduce elements of the story are pathetic (at one point they show a big chain to illustrate the fact that there was a chain). The effect isn’t “Super Giant;” it’s small. It’s much more interesting to listen to the details the teller chooses. This particular documentary feels weirdly like a struggle for literary power or narrative dominance.

I don’t know why. One guess? The first-person account is never not limited, but more often than not, literary power derives from ignoring your particular limitations and adopting a universal voice. Milton negotiates this by claiming he’s merely channeling God’s words. Dante sticks to a first-person account but loudly proclaims his debt to Virgil. The end of the amazing film “An Education” suffers, I think, because the final voiceover cancels out something appealingly omniscient. It’s interesting to think about an opposite case in which it’s the first-person account that carries authority.

That’s an incomplete answer, complicated in all kinds of ways, most significantly, to my mind, by Arko Datta, who took the iconic photograph for the 2005 tsunami of an Indian woman mourning a dead relative. The BBC reports on how he went and found her five years later. She’s become famous in the interim as a result of his photograph. She claims to remember him from the day he took the photo. (A day when she was prostrate on the sand mourning.) He talks about how he comes home every day and thanks God he’s still alive.

Neither half of this story adds up nicely. Fame messes with the schema and makes everyone just a touch more concerned with self than you’d hoped they’d be. She became too large while remaining mute, and he stopped photographing long enough to narrate his own subjective experience of the event in a way that highlights his good fortune. They overflow their parts in just the ways you hoped they wouldn’t.

Then there’s Michael Dobbs’ account for the Washington post, which is here. His readers take him to task for merely vacationing in a place where local residents suffered unmentionable hardships. His response to them is interesting, and the piece itself clearly suffers from a journalist’s double-vision. It’s distant, the way Ammianus might have written it: full of restraint and lodged two miles inland, even when the water’s swirling round.

Fondly,

M

*although Douglas Coupland’s “Survivor” does that pretty well, and in a similar region